In an exclusive story, Variety magazine reported on a new arrangement between Newsweek and Aspire Entertainment, whereby Aspire will take stories published in the magazine and develop them as films, TV series, and other media content.

Aspire vice president Teri Flynn cited “The Truth Was Out There” as an example of the “verve and attitude” evident in the new Newsweek. “This is not your grandmother’s Newsweek,” said Flynn.

28 November 2014

On November 29, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson directed the Warren Commission to “evaluate all the facts” in the brutal November 22 murder of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, on a downtown Dallas street in broad daylight. Reduced to its bare essentials, the investigation sought answers to three fundamental questions: Who, why and how?

“Why” was entirely contingent on “who,” and that depended on “how.” Thus, the linchpin of the Warren Report—and every subsequent investigation—has always been precisely how Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza. That is the finding from which all the important answers flow; mishandle that question and the credibility of the entire report is undermined. The Warren Commission’s bungling of “how” is a primary reason why there have been so many residual doubts and conspiracy theories over the past 50 years.

In the 1964 Warren Report, just seven pages (of 888) reconstruct the shooting sequence. Three spent cartridges were found in the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, corroborating the testimony of most ear- and eyewitnesses that three shots were fired. But after 10 months of investigation, the report did not present a compelling explanation of the sequence; instead it offered up three slightly different scenarios. In each, one of the bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald fatally hit Kennedy in the head; another struck and passed through the president before hitting Texas Governor John Connally; and the third shot fired by Oswald…well, the commission could not say where that bullet went or even when it was fired. Depending on which of the three scenarios one favored, the total time span of the assassination ranged from as little as 4.8 seconds “to in excess of 7 seconds.”

The story of how the Warren Commission fumbled this pivotal question is long and convoluted, and only the barest outline can be presented here. The saga involved not just the lawyer-dominated commission and staff but also the FBI, the Secret Service and the media, primarily the then-mighty Time Inc. empire. The crucial element, of course, was the most famous movie ever taken by a cameraman, the 26-second-long Zapruder film.

10 October 2014

In 2005, W. Mark Felt came forward in Vanity Fair to identify himself as journalism’s most famous secret source. The 91-year-old former FBI executive admitted—with a little push from his family—to being Deep Throat, the anonymous source whose information was vital to numerous scoops about the Watergate scandal written by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in 1972-73. A national guessing game that had been played for 31 years seemed over.

Yet the arrival of Deep Throat in the flesh created new complications, as media scholar Matt Carlson observed in 2010. A stroke-afflicted Felt was unable to speak on his own behalf; simultaneously, “Woodstein” (as the reporting duo were known internally at the Post) could no longer dictate the terms for how to think about Deep Throat. Speculation persisted, not only over how Woodward and Bernstein had used sources but also over what Carlson called “the overall accuracy of the Watergate narrative as retold by journalists,” who have a vested interest in a self-glorifying version.

Nothing did more to stoke these doubts than a 2012 biography of Ben Bradlee, Woodward and Bernstein’s fabled editor at the Post. In Yours in Truth, author Jeff Himmelman, a former Woodward disciple, described how he found an interview recorded while Bradlee was preparing his autobiography in the early 1990s. In it, the Post editor expressed doubts about Woodstein’s portrayal of Deep Throat in their book on the investigation, All the President’s Men.

“There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,” Bradlee told the interviewer in 1990. Himmelman also found in Bradlee’s papers a memo from Bernstein that described his clandestine encounter in December 1972 with a source identified only by the code name “Z.” In All the President’s Men, the information provided by “Z” was put on a par with disclosures made by Deep Throat. Himmelman put two and two together and realized “Z” was a member of the grand jury that had issued the original indictments against the Watergate burglars in September 1972—although in their book, Woodstein expressly denied getting information from anyone on the grand jury. One didn’t have to be a skeptic to believe that Woodward and Bernstein were still withholding the full truth about their exploits.

Now a document has surfaced in an unlikely place that sheds sorely needed light on Woodstein’s reporting while providing some perspective on the press’s role in uncovering the scandal.

Oddly enough, the document—a draft of a Woodstein story from January 1973—was buried deep within the papers of Alan J. Pakula, director of the eponymous 1976 Hollywood film based on Woodstein’s best-seller. Pakula, who died in 1998, deeded all his papers to the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—the people who give you the Oscars. The collection includes his copious research for All the President’s Men, and in many respects, Pakula’s papers are more illuminating about the book and the movie than Woodward’s and Bernstein’s own papers, which are housed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

18 June 2014

This time they're not paving paradise and putting up a parking lot. They're blowing up the parking lot.

And not just any parking lot. This particular parking lot — well, parking garage, if you want to get technical — is one of the most iconic venues in the history of journalism.

It's the place where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward conducted his clandestine meetings with his super-secret source, perhaps the most famous source in history: Deep Throat.

The Arlington County Board in Washington, D.C.'s, Virginia suburbs recently approved a plan to knock down a couple of buildings and replace them with a new residential/commercial complex, The buildings going away are on top of the garage where Woodward and Throat met as the young reporter pursued his investigation of the Watergate break-in.

Today, journalism is an embattled field. The Internet has upended the business model of traditional media, and the search for a bright digital future remains elusive. Journalists themselves don't fare too well in the court of public opinion, where polls find them languishing near the bottom with war criminals and members of Congress.

A general view is seen on June 16, 2014 in Arlington, Virginia of the office complex housing the underground garage where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met his Watergate source Deep Throat during the political scandal that brought down president Richard Nixon in 1974. Local authorities have given their blessing for the premises to be demolished to make way for a new high-rise development.(Photo: Robert MacPherson, AFP/Getty Images)

But Watergate brings to mind a very different time, when journalists were seen as heroic figures waging a lonely battle to uncover the truth and save the republic.

Woodward and fellow Post reporter Carl Bernstein were immortalized in the terrific 1976 movie All the President's Men (Rotten Tomatoes rating: 98% favorable), which was based on their book detailing their efforts to uncover the nefarious ways of one Richard M. Nixon and his henchmen. Among the most memorable scenes were the late night, film noir-drenched meetings in the doomed garage between Woodward (played by Robert Redford) and Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook).

Nixon, of course, was ultimately forced to resign, and the mythology has it that two young reporters took down a president.

There's no doubt that Woodstein did excellent work. The nation is in their debt for their efforts to keep the story alive after five burglars with links to the Committee to Re-elect the President broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex on June 17, 1972.

But as we know now, there's much more to the story, as there often is.

The reporters were hardly the only ones seeking to determine where the bungling Watergate burglars would lead. Federal prosecutors and the FBI were in diligent pursuit. Often, the dynamic duo's scoops were not news to the feds.

Also, Woodward and Bernstein were hardly the only journalists doing distinguished work. Seymour Hersh of The New York Times and Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times, among others, also broke important Watergate stories.

Getting back to the garage, we've learned much more about Deep Throat over the years. For three decades, speculating about the source's identity was a major journalistic parlor game. The mystery ended in 2005 with the revelation that Throat was actually W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 man in the FBI at the time.

We've also learned Felt's motivations were far more layered than his original portrayal as a noble whistle-blower, as Max Holland lays out in his excellent book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat. Evidence has emerged that Felt was a skilled, not to say Machiavellian, bureaucrat with self-serving motives for helping Woodward. The late Christopher Hitchens once described Felt's/Throat's machinations in The New York Times as "the single most successful use of the news media by an anonymous unelected official with an agenda of his own."